As the popularity of digital cameras continues grow, the use of on-line photo sharing websites for storing and sharing digital images is becoming more prevalent. The most common method for getting the digital images to the photo sharing websites is to load the images from the digital camera to a personal computer (PC) and use the Internet connection on the PC to upload images to the photo site.
Today, however, hand-held electronic devices are emerging, including digital cameras that have the capability to connect directly to the Internet without the use of the PC. For example, the assignee of the present application has developed an approach to uploading images to the Web. In this approach, an e-mail software application is loaded into a digital camera capable of running software applications that allows the user to e-mail images directly from the camera. The user simply connects his or her digital camera to a cell phone or a modem, runs the e-mail application, and selects the desired images and e-mail recipients. The selected images are then sent to the e-mail recipients as attachments.
A more advanced approach is to provide the digital camera with cell phone-like functionality in which the camera establishes an Internet connection with the photo sharing website by dialing an 800 number, for example, and automatically uploads the images.
One prohibitive factor to the widespread adoption of digital imaging is cost. Digital cameras are already relatively expensive to purchase, and providing digital cameras with Internet connectivity for uploading images to the Internet will only add to the expense. And ever increasing images sizes means that digital cameras will require larger memories, further adding to the expense. What's more, consumers will have to pay for the bandwidth consumed during transmission of images to the photo-sharing site. The cost for transmitting images will be a function of the size and number of the images, the speed of the modem or wireless medium, and the cost of calling the 800 number.
One reason why digital cameras require so much transmission bandwidth is because images stored on the digital camera are oftentimes transmitted over the Internet more than once. For example, consider the example where the user wants to send selected images to ten different work groups at work and selects the same image several times. The user may chose to send images 1, 2, and 8 to group 1, images 2, 5, 8 and 9 to group 2, images 3, 4, 8, and 10 to group, and so on. As can be seen, the same image (#8) must be transmitted over the Internet several times, consuming a large amount of bandwidth.
One way to reduce the bandwidth used transmitting images from the camera is to reduce the size of the image files by using higher compression rates and/or by capturing lower resolution images. However, the digital camera industry is attempting to meet to consumer demand for digital image quality that rivals film images, which may require image sizes of at least 4-10 MB. Using higher compression rates is not viable option because higher compression rates degrade image quality, and capturing lower resolution images is the antithesis of achieving film-quality.
Accordingly, what is needed is a method and system for reducing bandwidth and storage requirements of images transmitted from a digital camera. The present invention addresses such a need.